Key

Getting Started with gstatistics

Excerpt

This is the getting started guide for the Generic Statistics (gstatistics) component of the grepo framework.

It's not supposed to be a complete reference manual - the goal is to show a basic usage and configuration scenario of grepo's gstatistics component. If you have problems understanding parts of this guide or the framework in general or if you have any suggestions, good ideas or if you have found potential bugs please let us know. So let's get started!

Note

title

Version Information

This is the getting started guide for the Generic Statistics (gstatistics) component of the grepo framework version 1.5.x.

Table of Contents

minLevel

2

outline

false

Download the demo project

The demo project for this guide can be checked out from our SVN repository as follows:

The demo project is a maven project and we highly recommend that you use maven to set up the project. If you don't want to use maven you can also set up the project manually. If you use maven and eclipse you can easily make an eclipse project using the following command in the demo project's root directory:

No Format

$ mvn eclipse:eclipse

You can now import the project in your eclipse workspace.

After you have imported the project you should now be able to run the MyServiceTest JUnit test. You can also run the test using maven from command line:

No Format

$ mvn test

Demo application

The teeny-weeny demo application consists of one interface (MyService) and a class implementing the interface (MyServiceImpl). The method doSomething1() makes use of grepo's MethodStatistics annotation. Method doSomething2() demonstrates how to use grepo's StatisticsManager directly.

Note: In the demo project we use the gstatistics component to track statistics of method executions. However its also possible to track statistics for various executions (not just method executions), e.g. tracking statistics of entire business processes etc.

Using the grepo framework

In order to use the gstatistics component you need the following grepo artifacts (jars) in your project's classpath:

grepo-core-<VERSION>.jar

grepo-statistics-<VERSION>.jar

Somewhere in your Spring application context (xml) you have to import the default configuration of the grepo gstatistics component.

In the demo project this is done in src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/application-context.xml. Note that you may not need to import that file if you decide to setup grepo with special/custom configuration - you could for instance configure the required "grepo" beans directly in your application context.

Furthermore we use spring's component-scan feature in order to create a (spring) bean for our MyServiceImpl class - this is standard spring configuration. Additionally we use grepo's SimpleStatisticsCollectionPrinter which is used to print out summary and details about collected statistics. (Using the SimpleStatisticsCollectionPrinter is optional, but we use its handy methods in our MyServiceTest class to print out some information about collected statistics):

This output is produced by grepo's SimpleStatisticsCollection printer using the printSummary() method. We can see that we have 1 collection entry, which is displayed in the line below. We read the line as follows: The identifier for the collection entry is 'demo.service.MyService.doSomething1' and there were 10 invocations for that identifier. The minimum duration was 10 milliseconds, the maximum duration was 476 milliseconds, and the average duration is 275 milliseconds.

Here we can see the details about the collection entry with the identifier 'demo.service.MyService.doSomething1'. This output is produced by grepo's SimpleStatisticsCollection printer using the printDetail() method. At the top of the output we see the summary for the collection entry (invocations, min-duration, max-duration, average-duration). Then we see five the top durations (including details) that is invocations which had the longest execution duration. And finally we see the 10 recent invocations (including details).

How it works

Identifier generation

The identifier for the collection entry is generated automatically using an instance of org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.service.StatisticsEntryIdentifierGenerationStrategy. In the default configuration grepo uses an instance of org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.service.StatisticsEntryIdentifierGenerationStrategyImpl - this implementation generates identifiers as follows:

method.getDeclaringClass().getName() + "." + method.getName()

Feel free to provide your own implementation if desired.

You can also use the identifier attribute of grepo's MethodStatistics annotation. Doing so grepo won't use the StatisticsEntryIdentifierGenerationStrategy at all. When using the StatisticsManager directly (as demonstrated in MyServiceImpl.doSomething2()) then you have to provide an appropriate identifier anyway, so grepo won't use the StatisticsEntryIdentifierGenerationStrategy in that case.

Collecting statistics

The StatisticsManager uses a org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.collection.StatisticsCollectionStrategy for collecting statistics. In the default configuration grepo uses an instance of org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.collection.InMemoryStatisticsCollectionStrategy which stores collections entries in memory using an instance of org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.collection.StatisticsCollection. Feel free to provide your own implementation(s) if desired.

The org.codehaus.grepo.statistics.collection.StatisticsCollectionImpl holds all collection entries - grepo's SimpleStatisticsCollectionPrinter uses a StatisticsCollection instance for printing out summary and details. Because grepo stores collection entries in memory by default, there are two properties for the StatisticsCollectionImpl which should be configured appropriately to avoid wasting of memory:

maxNumberOfRecentStatisticsEntries: This value controls how many (recent) invocations should be maintained. In the default configuration this value is set to 30.

maxNumberOfTopDurationStatisticsEntries: This value controls how many (top duration) invocations should be maintained. In the default configuration this value is set to 5.

Additional functionality

Exporting SimpleStatisticsCollectionPrinter to JMX

We have already used grepo's SimpleStatisticsCollectionPrinter in the examples above. This class is appropriately annotated so that it is easy to export instances of this class to a JMX server using springs MBeanExporter as follows:

Enabling statistics for gquery and gprocedure

The gquery and gprocedure components of the grepo framework can be easily configured for statistics. See the getting started guides for the Generic Query (Hibernte/Jpa) and Generic Procedure components for details.